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No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.

Anne Michaels

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Anne Michaels
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: April 15
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
Terror
Skull
Lucky
Unlucky
Arms
Skulls
Inside
Tail
Born
Emerge
Someone
Brushes
Long
Tails
Love
Wake

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History and memory share events that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.
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I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
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The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
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When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.
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Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.
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If love wants you if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills with feathers and scales with warm blood and cold.
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Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
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To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
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The truth doesn't care what we think of it.
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Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.
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When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
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Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.
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I see that I must give what I most need.
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There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
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